Hey guys,
So we made a Vessel Alarm and Monitoring system based on Ignition 8.1 that gets I/Os mainly from an S7-1500 Siemens PLC. Originally the system was designed to work with WinCC Pro but during programming phase we switch to Ignition because of the lack alarm parameters in WinCC (adding a delay is not even posible and layout/objects are horible).
That brought a new problem that I'm trying to fix now. Ignition does not have OPC UA Alarm & Event and from what I saw here it's still not really on the road map. I would need that in order to send alarms and conditions of said alarms to multiples Siemens Unified Panels across the ship.
Whitout OPC UA A&C, I was thinking that I could list all the Unacked alarms and send that to a string array that can dirently be in the S7-1500 or sent to it so that alarms can match on all Panels VS the main Station where Ignition runs.
I've tried that in scripting but failed miserably (Python novice). I'm able to write to one string with the latest alarm message but can't figure out how to have all the current alarms (ex: all unacked)
For now we have created all alarms in the PLC but that is the main thing I was trying to avoid..else WinCC would have worked the same way in the first place.
I do run Vision and perhaps Perspective could have worked runing a browser on all Unified Panels..but the cost for all the licenses is way to high for an ongoing project with a fix budget.
Any help would be appreciated.
I don't have any helpful advice, but I am interested in clarifying your use case for the sake of our OPC UA feature road map.
Most requests we've received for Event and A&C support has been for the ability to subscribe/receive Events/Alarms from a server (in most cases a server embedded on a PLC), meaning the alarms are defined in the server and not in Ignition - Ignition is just reacting to the event occurring in some manner.
Given:
I don't know anything about Siemens Unified Panels. It sounds like they are a stand alone HMI (not running Vision or Perspective) and are capable of acting as an OPC UA client and subscribing to Events and Alarms on some other OPC UA server? And you want that server to be Ignition, exposing the Ignition tags and alarms to interested clients/subscribers?
If the panels are running Vision and not some other HMI or OPC UA client then you can just forget about OPC UA as the connection between the panels and the central gateway and use Gateway Network connections and remote tag providers or something. No need for OPC UA A&C. And this is assuming the panels run their own stand-alone panel edition Gateway+Vision for the HMI and aren't just launched off the central gateway.
side note: are you the same Michael Gagne I met back when you worked for Kepware/PTC?
Thanks Kevin for the quick reply!
Yes, the Ignition Gateway needs to act as an Alarm Server with OPC UA with Alarm and condition, that would be working if the feature is available.
Tha Unified Panels are their latest Panel and runs on WinCC Unified so yes they can subscribed to a OPC UA Server. That feature was even tested by Siemens at the beginning of the project to confirm that WinCC Pro can be the provider and Panels can display the alarms. It worked but after that, dealing with WinCC Pro was another ball game. And WinCC Pro has to be used because our system needs to be redundant (Unified still does not support redundancy). So after some testing and setup we switched to Ignition knowing we would have issues sending alarms to the Panels...but we did anyway.
The Panels themselves are Linux based but with proprietary stuff from Siemens. I've tried some Linux boot hack but was not able to do much. All that said, they can't run Vision or at least from the test I've done I was not able to manually install other softwares.
So our needs would be that Ignition is the OPC UA A&C Server than the Panels can subscribe.
I've read all the posts about the Alarm & Event and from programming in last December I was hopping that the feature would be release by now.
Unfortunately not the same Michael 
Also excuse my less than perfect English, not my first language.
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Unfortunately even if it were done by now, what we're planning to implement is the opposite of what you're looking for - it's giving Ignition the ability to consume and act on Events from other OPC UA servers.
Exposing Ignition Alarms to 3rd party OPC UA clients is not something that has been requested often (ever?). I'm not sure how well Ignition's alarm model even maps to OPC UA's concept of Alarms and Conditions.